


Skaian Determinism

by LRadiata



Category: Homestuck
Genre: And Many Interconnected Answers, But More Character Death Than Would Be Otherwise Expected, But a Central Question, Fluff, Free will is probably a lie, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, In a Very 'I Never Read the Epilogues' Kinda Way, Kinda, Less Than Canon-Typical Character Death, No Central Plot, Shades Are Not A Heritable Genetic Trait, Skaia is a Rude Dude, Ultimate Selves, its ok tho they have fun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 10:41:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29758413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LRadiata/pseuds/LRadiata
Summary: "I meant actual modern English when we were younger. It's a miracle that either of us can speak at all, given our upbringing. You at least had the carapacians to teach you how to exist in a society but I, by all accounts, should be absolutely feral."A series of snapshots from the lives of Skaia's chosen children, vaguely alluding to the concept of ultimate selves.
Kudos: 11





	Skaian Determinism

Sometimes you find yourself expecting something different. Oh, you're John by the way. You just turned eleven. And when you turn the corner and see your Dad in one of his baking frenzies, a chill runs down your spin. You figure it just has to do with all the gross baked goods that are sure to fill your house shortly after.

You explain the evil laughter that comes to mind when you see the betty crocker logo in much the same way. Of course the woman who made a confectionery empire would have to be evil. Your Dad is merely one of her brainwashed subjects. It's pretty fun, entertaining that kind of scenario. Especially when your friends play along.

Rose will sometimes pretend to be brainwashed herself and begin to weave pro baking propaganda in random conversations. Of course, she fails to resist the urge to make jabs at the hypothetical sugar baroness while she's at it. The one time you called her on her lack of commitment to the roleplaying scenario, Rose laughed at you with mock condescension. She said that it would have been obvious to anyone with a brain that her seeming complacency with the Battterwitch’s schemes was necessary for a larger plot to further her own ends.

Calling Betty Crocker the Battewitch kinda stuck after that. Rose’s other main contribution to the game was the inclusion of gratuitous tentacle monsters. You aren’t sure why they are there, but they are. You've decided not to fight it.

Dave is too busy with his flimsy cool guy act to humor you most of the time. He is, however, on the record as rambling about how if he was going along with the premise that Betty Crocker is evil, which he is most certainly not, he would probably launch a campaign of heroics against her only to die ironically at the last minute. Saving the day is cool and all, but dying trying to fight the overpowered final boss while severely under leveled is cooler, apparently. You count it as enough of a win.

And then there's Jade. She's the most invested in the premise out of everyone, maybe including you. You've spent hours together coming up with secret codes for talking without the Batterwitch catching wise, or running escape plans back and forth. Should the worst come to pass, you will ride your pogo ride into the sunset. Jade has fewer options given that she is on a random island in the middle of nowhere, but you figure that for the sake of parallelism she should at least put forth an effort to ride Bec into the sunset. She says that it would probably actually work, but you don't see how.

And someday, when jade is able to leave her home for the mainland, she will rise up and start a corporation of her own to compete with the wicked and all consuming red spoon. She will sell meat maybe? She already has experience lightly irradiating stakes. Making nuclear hamburgers is the obvious next step.

In a moment of uncharacteristic gravity, you get Jade to agree that if only one of you is ever able to slip away from the Batterwitch, it should be her. She has a chance of fighting, where you would be entirely ineffectual. Meanwhile, you would have significantly better luck dislodging yourself from events that are relevant and essential to the greater narrative and living a normal life.

It's alright, really. You can survive living in a house with a baking fanatic. You have dreams in life, and they don’t involve becoming some sort of revolutionary. Ol’ Ms. Crocker doesn’t know you know, so you’ll probably even get to live them. And hey, it's not like you won’t keep in touch.

Jade plays along, as always. She tells you that while you are living comfortably under the thumb of a baking empire, she’ll be toughing it out in the woods somewhere, surviving off the land or something. She is quite the green thumb, pumpkin issues aside. And she’ll stay in contact as much as it's safe to do so.

It's fun, entertaining that kind of scenario. Especially since it stops you from worrying about what it means when each new Betty Crocker product you discover fills you with a sinking dread. Of course you wouldn't want the Batterwitch to sink her claws into yet another industry. It's just a game, or a joke that you’ve gotten a bit too caught up in. Nothing that needs to be investigated too closely.

Being caught investigating is yet another thought that makes you uneasy.

* * *

You are Dirk Strider, and at age seven you think the world is rather tiny. You never sleep, and that only gives you more time to appreciate it. On one end you have an empty apartment and an endless sea. On the other there is an inert and lifeless battlefield, waiting for nobles to wait for gods. But you’ve just found a speck of hope that’s set your mind ablaze.

It would seem that the other tower in your dreamscape has another human in it. The only other human you've ever seen outside of pictures.. Maybe, just maybe the only other human with you on earth. Maybe even one of three? You aren’t supposed to play the game alone, after all. 

You've always assumed it would be dangerous to be seen leaving your room. The batterwitch probably has her grubby fingers in Derse like everything else, and you’ve only survived as long as you have by giving her minimal information. Going down the floors of your own tower while in stealth mode is an acceptable risk. You need the information. But just up and leaving through the window isn't something you had even strongly considered.

Even so, the mysterious girl in the other tower doesn’t seem to have run into any problems. 

She only goes out every couple of months, sometimes a couple of nights in a row. You begin making plans to go out after her. Elaborate plans. Plans that involve making yourself a felt body double in case anyone comes into your room to check on you, and improving your flash step to be able to make a series of highly choreographed leaps. 

It all has to be perfect. There is another human in the other tower. She probably doesn’t know you exist, because you've never let yourself be seen. It was a good decision, but you hate yourself for maintaining it. There is another human right there and you could talk to her. You have to talk to her.

It all has to be perfect until one day when she floats by your window and you make the impulse decision to pull her through. Before you now floats a girl with blonde hair that curls exactly once. And she's. Sleepwalking? You've never woken a person up before. You try making a loud noise. You try splashing her face with water. You try pinching her.It doesn’t work. Sleepwalking, huh? With your shades, no one would know the difference.

In one reality you take her by the hand and guide her back to her tower. Human hands are so warm. In the other you make your way to the shower and begin to sob. You were so close. You sit by her cat plush filled bedside and under the running water for the rest of the afternoon. You've never lost anything like this before. You've never had anything to lose.

When your earthly body has to sleep, you float yourself back to your own tower. You stare at the ceiling and try not to think. When you wake up, you let your carefully maintained routines fall into disarray. It doesn’t matter.You give into entropy.

You discover a useful trick. If you attempt difficult tasks in both realites, it doesn’t leave room in your brain for anything else. 

You don't go fishing and survive off of canned garbage. You train until you collapse. If the drones came by you would be in bad shape, but you can’t find it in yourself to care enough to change your behavior. You waste hours looking at memes on the Old internet.

You don’t know how long it is. You don’t bother counting the days.Nothing changes anyway.

Until one day your computer screen goes white and garish pink text appears one letter at a time as someone types.

r u there? 

In polite terms, you thoroughly freak out. Your poor heart can't take these ups and downs after the flat plane your life has been until now. That doesn’t stop you from typing out a reply, though. Nothing in the world could stop you from replying.

I'm here.

Omg. finally

this isn't liek,,, a trick is it?

*like

u r human

I'm human. You are too, right? I thought I was the only one.

I have 2 hands, 2 feet, and 0 gills

What are ur qualifications, umm

mr? ms? human who definitely isn’t fish hitler in disguise

I solemnly swear there is no fishy business going on here.

I am Mr. Strider, but my friends call me Dirk.

Or at least I'm sure they would if I had any.

u do. I'm your fried now, di-stri. you don’t gotta choice in it

wait strider? like the director?

*friend

That's my bro. He's so cool.

im roxy lalonde

The author? Actually, now that I think about it…

Would you happen to have blonde hair with a curl on the right side of your forehead.

And umm

Your room has stuffed cats in it?

yes. how d u kno

I

…

I can’t.

:???

I want to tell you. I really do.

But if S)(e is reading this I'd rather keep my cards close to my chest.

I’ll explain someday, I promise.

hmmmmmmm

ok

as long as u promise, i guess.

So how have you been spending your days in this waterpocalypse?

You talk for hours. You are having two way communication with another person for the first time in your life, and you talk for hours. You let your Derse body cry for you so your eyes stay clear. You talk for hours, and you do it again the next day, and the day after. You get your routine back in order just to make sure you have time to talk to Roxy in between fulfilling the requirements for survival. 

You've never been happier.

* * *

You are Dirk Strider, but these days you go by Bro. The kid you are supposed to prepare won’t stop crying and you haven’t slept in way too long. You feel like you are going insane. This can't possibly be worth it. You take Dave by the scruff of the neck, and from your top story widow, you defenestrate a chil--

* * *

Name: Kankri Vantas. Age: 6 Sweeps. Blood color: ...Other. 

For as long as you can remember, you’ve had something like a gut feeling or a voice in the back of your head saying that there is something horribly wrong with troll society and that the responsibility to fix it falls onto you personally. No one else is even capable of being responsible for anything, because they don’t know any better.

But, well. You aren’t sure that you know better yourself. The whole situation is pretty strange given that you are basically living in a utopia beyond your ancestor’s wildest dreams. Assuming someone like you even has an ancestor, of course.

You’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about it, and you just do not see it. But no matter how true that may be, it doesn’t stop nagging feeling. There is something wrong, something you could find if only you knew where to look.

You have resorted to consulting your friends about it. They are about as helpful as you would expect. Meenuh, for instance, takes great offense at the general lack of permissible stabbings. Meenuh is also on the actual literal moon, so you take this with a grain of salt.

Porrim at the very least offers actual criticism of the social order of Beforus, and points you in the direction of some reading on the subject. It's not quite right, but it's a start. You do some digging into the terms you don’t know. That digging leads to more digging and by the time you're done you think you've figured it out.

Absolutely everything about the modern way of life is problematic. It's insidious really, because of how peaceful it looks on the surface. Most people can’t even see it. Even you were blinded at first, but you know better now.

Oh wait, no. That's ableist language. Implying that the vision impared are worse off is a harmful stereotype. And before now you wouldn't have even considered your choice in metaphor. That's how brainwashed your entire civilization is.

You have to work on checking your privilege. Your entire group does. Or maybe your entire generation or the world at large. Every day that these injustices continue in another day that people are being triggered by misguided trolls with too many insensitive and meaningless words to say. When you think about it like that, the world can't afford for you to stand idly by for one minute longer.

You can't say that you don't have your work cut out for you, though. Now that you are on the lookout for society’s subtle microaggressions you can see them everywhere. They are in the movies you watch and the conversions you used to have. Stores, restaurants, and parks. Nowhere is safe. They even plague your education system.

You join the conversation and speak out against Beforus’s oppressive regime. Some people hate you for it, but that's ok. You are only speaking the truth, and someday they will all be thanking you instead.

* * *

You are Dirk Strider, but these days you go by Bro. Knowing what you know about the kid’s session, you figure there might be a way to get a better outcome faster. In a few years, you should head straight to Derse and execute --

* * *

Jade Harley, that is to say you, used to rely on the intuition granted to her by forces beyond her understanding. It wasn’t until it was too late and everything was gone that you realized how deceptive Skaia had been in what it showed you. For all you knew how to complete certain loops, and that you were going to play a game with your friends, you had no idea the cost it would come at.

Now that's gone, you aren’t free per se, but no longer do you play the role of a willing puppet. In some strange way, you think you miss it. Or rather, you miss the person you were and the life you lived before it disappeared. You used to play guessing games with supernatural ease. Now half of your fetch modi have been rendered frustratingly difficult to use, and most of the rest were never anything else to begin with. It feels like you lost something much greater than you did.

But life moves on. You get better at pictionary. It's nice to be good at something as a result of your own hard work for once. Eventually, you begin to fill sketchbooks with pages upon pages of original drawings of animals and such. You resolve never to show them to anyone. You keep a few pieces you like under your bed and burn the rest, just to minimize the risk. You swear, if your artistic pursuits end up being just another thing that's necessary to complete the timeline, you might very well strangle someone. This is yours and Skaia can’t have it. 

One true skill still doesn't replace everything you used to effortlessly be, however. And so sometimes you still do the emotional equivalent of repeatedly walking into a brick wall hoping you'll arrive at a train to hogwarts if you try just one more time. Sometimes you still set your modus to memory. Sometimes you follow the urge to take seemingly meaningless actions and wonder if they will end up having any greater cosmic significance. Eventually like that, you discover that you still have an uncanny knack for science and engineering. 

It freaks you out the first time you notice it. You seem to be able to build advanced machines with the exact same unnatural competence as when you were younger. So much time wasted looking for such a thing, and you can't even bring yourself to be happy about finding it. You spend a while considering your options. You could just ignore it, maybe. Never build another machine again. Pack your bags and go home. Or you could give in to it. Accept that paradox space has another purpose for you. Enjoy the benefits while they last.

No. You are done accepting your fate and you're done losing important things. You are going to learn the skill for real, like you did with art. You alchemize some textbooks from drawings and get to work.

Even the theory comes naturally, but you repeatedly review it repeatedly anyway. Intuition can be taken from you, but hard studied facts are forever. At least you can take that the text feels right in your mind to mean you alchemized an actual textbook rather than some joke combination item. Or paradox space is playing a gigantic prank on you.

If your understanding of this sort of thing was stored in your dreamself, you might have gotten it back when you god tiered. If that hypothesis is correct, you should also have regained an understanding of your colorful reminders. You tie some miscellaneous threads to your fingers. The only thing you remember when looking at them is that they used to mean something. So that's one idea ruled out.

You don’t get the time to theorize further. John and Dave are. Gone. Now. You are alone again. You don't do anything of significance for a long time. Or maybe very briefly. You don’t know. You don’t care to check. Time passes, until a muse of your own aspect pulls you out of it. You have to get back to your life, to do something that makes you feel human again. You don't even know where to start.

Eventually you catch a glimpse of your still entwined fingers and remember something that would be a good place to start.

* * *

You are Dirk Strider, and at age fourteen your world is much bigger than it used to be. In the most literal sense, you are no longer confined to your apartment twice over. You've explored much of Derse, either gathering information or guiding Roxy home. You know enough now to start setting things up for what you are going to have to do. It's a lot but you aren’t in any particular rush.

In a more important sense, half your life ago, you were alone and now your social circle has expanded to fit six, if you count turnways versions of yourself. You've even met the boy of your dreams. You aren’t sure if he likes you back, but you have plans to find out and court him. Elaborate plans. Plans that you jokingly thought up over a year ago, and your brain clone seems to have fewer qualms with carrying out.

Well, that's not entirely fair to your autoresponder. If the brobot is any indication, you made him from a point in time where you were generally more willing to engage reckless plotting without thinking too hard about the repercussions. You probably only became less willing to do so by watching the consequences of his schemes. In fact, you still don't see anything wrong with your past actions on their own merits.

The brobot,as an allegory for everything you've ever done, is entirely justifiable on teleological grounds. Jake was and is better having it.You know what it's like to live all alone in a small building in the middle of the sea, wondering how long it'll be before you go out and don't come back. You couldn’t let a friend go through that. Not if you could help. And sure, you might have gone a bit overboard with it, but it kills two birds with one stone that way. You not only alleviated his justifiable fear of an untimely demise, but also began proper preparations for the game.

Of course, your otherself also believes his actions to be teleologically sound. You can’t convincingly argue in favor of the more deontological approach you've taken recently, because he is as blind his own failures as you are, and he doesn’t have a copy of his brain running about and making the flaws in his decision making process blatantly apparent.

You're not even sure you want to know how he justifies all the questions he's been asking you lately. ‘Do you remember how you first learned to talk’ this and ‘who are you walking upright for’ that. Even ‘Speech and culture are not innate parts of the human psyche. What does that make you?”. 

You looked it up once. He's right of course. It really isn’t consistent with the scientific understanding of child development for you to have been a relatively normal kid. But it's still obviously just shitty mind games, isn't it? He knows as well as you do that you don't have a good answer, so he's throwing absurd conclusions around to mess with you.

So you move on with your days and don't pay it much mind. You marathon your Bro’s movies instead. You've found more and more to appreciate in them as you've gotten older. You invite Jake, Roxy, and UU to partake as well, even if that semblance of community serves to drive home how alone you really are. You consider including Jane as well, but she is still out of the loop on the whole from the future thing.

The autoresponder contacts you around the third movie. He’s not asking permission to join the conversation, not exactly. He doesn’t feel like he has enough autonomy to be comfortable giving any of it up. But he does extend the olive branch of asking what he would have to do for you to be comfortable with his inclusion. You're still mad at him because you lied and have actually been thinking about your unprecedented spontaneous language acquisition nonstop, but you would never let him know he got to you. You tell him not to impersonate you or fuck with any of the few human connections you have.

He doesn’t retort with a witty remark about how that's literally what you created him to do, like you expect. He simply enters the group chat with black text and finds a place for himself in the flow of the conversation. You spend a while waiting for the other shoe to drop. For you to see a strand of orange you didn’t write, or him to make a cruel remark and call it yours by association.

He doesn't. Eventually you realize he's just here to have a good time with your friends, bonding over your Bro’s outrageously outstanding examples of quality cinematography. His friends, you remind yourself guilily. His friends until last year. His Bro too, and you know yourself well enough to know that hasn’t changed.

Once you relax a little, it's actually fun. He’s the only person who has overthought those movies as much you, so you are able to play off of eachother with condescending comments about how the janky and unnecessary CGI is actually symbolic of the flaws of late stage capitalism, and if you can't see that then you clearly don't know anything about narrative motifs or good story telling. 

It's nice. You don’t bite each other's heads off or ever get more than passingly antagonistic. You would even go so far as to say the marathon party is better for having him. As much as you sometimes hate yourself, and by extension brain clones of you who shall remain nameless, there have always been moments like this where you couldn’t bring yourself to see him as anything worse than another scared kid all alone in the middle of the ocean.

It's nice, and that's what's so awful about it. You know that you are going to fight again. This one good day isn’t going to mark the end of his plotting and scheming, or the revulsion you feel when you look at yourself from a third person perspective. But in this one tranquil moment you know that no matter how bad it gets, you’ll never be able to bring yourself to kill him, or worse, force him back into a life of endless isolation.

Yes, you are going to fight again and it's going to get nasty, but for now that's a problem for tomorrow’s you.

* * *

Your name is Aradia. You preserve the timeline. To this end, the other Aradia’s that have come and gone have made a habit of sending their memories to you over the Skaian wifi. You use this information to steer your group away from similar mistakes. So for you, having access to information and memories that you didn’t personally experience isn’t strange at all.

* * *

You are Dirk Strider, but these days you go by Bro. You are beginning to question if all this training will really help the kid with the game. Maybe you’ll let up a --

* * *

A cool dude is standing around as cool dudes are known to do. He's so cool in fact that he has been known to refer to himself in third person during his inner monologues. Ironically, of course.Ok, yeah. That's going to get old fast if you keep it up. You decide to leave the narration out of your ironic pursuits.

So the point is this. You are Dave Strider, multimedia sensation and revolutionary extraordinaire. You are so cool that you could probably freeze the entire ocean, and ruin )(er plans right here and now if you felt like it. Though that would endanger humanity in its own right. You think you'll hold off for now. But maybe one day your coolness will freeze a small section of the endless sea so that a human or two might walk again.

Nope. nevermind. That is too sappy and also beside the point. Which is this. For real this time. Okay so you have a problem that's starting to become a Problem. Namely what your best friend and probable ectorelative likes to mockingly call a case of crippling pupaphobia. Well ok, the diagnosis itself probably isn't mocking. It's a pretty accurate and occasionally helpful piece of information.

What’s mocking is the basket of lovingly handcrafted puppets you just found on your doorstep. 

None of them are particularly cruel, mind you. You've occasionally humored Rose with in depth discussions of your… predicament. The marionettes and paper puppets she’s graciously gifted upon you don’t provoke anything worse than mild discomfort. Even after a stunt like this, you implicitly trust that she would never escalate her petty jabs to the point of sending you something more like a ventriloquist dummy.

You are about to toss the entire thing when you notice the handwritten note attached to the basket’s handle:

From one expecting mother to another:

In a bout of maternal instinct I seemed to have picked up multiple artistic hobbies including but not limited to woodcarving, sewing, and basic pencil on paper 2D sketching. This is not to mention the knitting abilities you already know me to possess, and the puppetry I learned in order to ensure my creations were in proper working order. When I was finished, I realized that the fruits of my labor would be better suited for your child than mine. I am confident that you will appreciate this gift I’ve made with all the love and care I would afford to my own precious baby girl.

Your loving friend and family,

Rose lalonde

P.s. In all seriousness, I regret to inform you that the most fortuitous future is one where you leave your bro with large amounts of felt. Don’t ask me why. I wish I knew.

You. suppose that this was one of the less awful ways she could have told you about the fact that you'll apparently be going to the fabric store like it's full of toys and you are doing some last minute christmas shopping for a party your aunt invited you to the day before it was set to happen. All of your young relatives will be there, and they have been known to crucify anyone who doesn’t get them enough christmas presents.

In fact, if you trace their lineage far enough back, Jesus was crucified because he didn’t get their ancestors a present at his own birthday party.You suppose that they would be your ancestors as well, but those genes firmly skipped you thank you very much. Which exactly why you are buying christmas presents to appease them rather than being a part of their ingroup. So it's that day, and you are nervously walking down the christmas isles, wondering how many toys will be enough to keep their wrath at bay, and adding more and more to the cart as the fear grows.

Not that you actually have ancestors. An aunt. Or any certain genetic relations at all. What you are trying to say is that you are going to walk into a fabric store under threat from the future, willingly handle large amounts of felt, and be at least mildly on edge the entire time. 

No, on second thought you'll just make Rose do it. This is her mystical prophecy of unclear significance, she can deal with it. You are too cool to go to fabric shops anyway. And Rose would have a better idea of what good crafts material looks and feels like. It's not like she said you had to be the one to supply the felt.

You just. Have to leave it in your home. So Dirk can find it, and do some timeline integral thing or another. No big deal.

Addendum 2 to your unbelievably cool and casual plan: You are either going to have Rose wait until the last minute to buy the felt, or else have her keep it in her own home for a while. It's not that you think you would have trouble sleeping at night if you knew your house contained plush puppet flesh. Your apartment is a lot smaller than Rose’s home, that's all. 

And if that's never gotten in the way of your literal doomsday prepping before, that's certainly not any of Rose’s business. Maybe if you make it up to her, she’ll let you live this down someday. It's not a strong hope, but it's better than nothing. 

You suppose if you can get the seer stamp of approval for it, the most fair thing would be to get a subtle gift for the young Lalonde. There has to be something she’ll be interested in that you know more about than Rose.

* * *

You are Dirk Strider, but these days you go by Bro. And you can’t do this anymore. You don’t care if it causes trouble, she’s a better person and a better guardian than you. You're sending the kid to La--

* * *

You are she that the horror terrors from beyond the furthest ring call Rose Lalonde. You are in what appears to be a dream bubble based off of your own recollections of your childhood home. You think back. Your most recent memories can be dated to partially through the third year of the meteor’s journey.

If you died, it was most likely in a doomed offshoot off the alpha session. Your own survival is part of the outcome you would consider fortunate, and there is no one on the meteor with both the capacity and the willingness to doom a timeline. You've all seen how that ends a little too closely.

If you are alive, your surroundings aren’t the result of a mass dream bubble that the entirety of the meteor is inhabiting. You’ve come here alone, via sleep. That is to say, if you’re alive, paradox space brought you here for a reason. 

You decide that you might as well place your bets on the latter possibility. You turn to explore your dreamscape, only to find your own eyes reflected back at you, blank and lifeless. Except, no, That's not exactly right.

She’s definitely you. She has your hair, your face, your clothes, or at least ones like those you wore when you were mortal. You know exactly what her faux condescending smirk means as she watches you process from just outside of your personal space. You have worn it often enough yourself. She is exactly as tall as you, and presumably the same age.

You might go back on your earlier sentiments and consider the possibility of a recently doomed double, if not for a thin scar above her left eyebrow, healed and faded by time. A scar you've never had.

You take a shot and ask her if she’s from your future. She corrects you. She is from a future, maybe but not yours. The time she lived has already long since passed from your perspective, yet she could not in any honest way be considered a specter of your past either.

Considering that she’s you, that was a fairly transparent way of saying that she’s from the universe that you are heading towards. No one beats Dave in a game of confusing referential tenses. He’s simply the best there is, but you are a close third after Karkat. 

Still, you find it ever so slightly sad that your turnways self never got to be an adult. You tell her as much. She tells you that some version of her did, but there was something important she had to do in the dream bubbles while still a teenager. She just happened to lose the timeline lottery.

After a bit more talking you discover that both of you can tell that your conversation in this moment is important for achieving the ending you want, but neither of you are clear on what exactly it is you are supposed to be discussing. 

You suppose it's more likely to be something you are supposed to do than something she is supposed to do, but you can’t actually rule anything out. You agree to converse accordingly. You fail to understand Karkat’s persisting issues with talking to different iterations of himself. So far this has gone exceedingly smoothly.

She tells you about her childhood. You tell her about your time in the game. Eventually the conversation drifts to your surprise that she is as much of an unawakened seer of light as you ever were. That surprise fades slightly when you are prompted to recall the occasions in which you and yours displayed connections to your roles prior to becoming deities. 

You instead take the opportunity to discuss with one like yourself what being a seer of light even means. A lot of the concclusion’s shes come to without the game to guide her sound a lot like the things Terezi has said about seeing, as well as the things that Terezi has said about Vriska.

Being a seer of light grants one all the clues they need to allow the most fortunate possible outcome to pass, but it's up to the individual to determine what kind of fortune they are looking for. She asks you what you would consider lucky. 

You think about it briefly and admit that you just want to escape the game without losing anyone else. There were people you could have saved last time, if you'd let go of petty passive aggressive stunts just a little sooner. Not again. Not ever again.

When you flip the question on her and ask what desired future brought her here, she tells you that there someday will be and paradoxically already are two very lonely children that she is supposed to protect. They’ve had to go through so much due to forces beyond their control. The Rose before you died so that they will someday be in control of their own lives, however they decide they want to live them.

She considered that maybe she had to talk to you to convince you that it would be fortunate if the children of her universe survived to see the universe you are fated to create, but after hearing your own new years resolution she has deemed that possibility highly unlikely. You still aren’t even remotely sure what you are here for either.

You hear a knock, and open your real eyes as the dreamscape fades. You can tell you’ve completed your quest objective. Hopefully make some sort of sense in hindsight.

You open your bedroom door to see your dearest and only living biological relative looking like he is in dire need of a distraction from whatever is going on with him. You totally intend to do so friendly prying into his personal matters later, but for the moment you decide to be a good sister.

You tell him that you just had a conversation with your past future alpha doomed dreamghost self. He laughs and says that with that many qualifiers the game has achieved its purpose, and you should be able to go home now. You counter with the fact that he could almost certainly add more qualifiers if he felt like fully utilizing his time travel capabilities, and because he has yet to do so you will all be trapped on the meteor for a little longer.

You then proceed to play shitty alchemized video games until an hour that the trolls would consider a good time to be awake. He eventually falls into restful sleep, and you are careful not to wake him as you record everything you can.

It's not until much later that it occurs to you that there was something deeply wrong about that conversation.

* * *

You are Dirk Strider, but these days you go by Bro. Ghosts of memories have been coming to you lately. The batterwitch? A different Roxy. Jake. And Jane. Wait, Jake? He's still alive isn't he? You should go. You have to go find hi--

* * *

You are Dirk Strider, but these days you go by Bro. You sit on the edge of a roof even more familiar than it ought to be, and once again run through the same set of thoughts you’ve never had before. You are pretty sure your decision is the right one when you lea--

* * *

Jade English, that is to say you, has dedicated her life to understanding and advancing technology. You were never going to win the battle against Crocker Corp., but you were at least able to force your Mother’s hand a little. The Alternian and Skaian gadgets She released to keep up with you should help the younger generation fight Her, when the time comes.

You haven’t actually gone toe to toe with Her since your company went under. Rose said that your efforts should be quieter now. Rose says a lot of things, usually delivered like mystical revelations. You might have thought her crazy, if not for the crazy things you've seen for yourself, and the fact that she is usually right.

So you spend your days quietly. You study mechanics and build machines with no less intensity than before, but supply your creations to the revolution directly. You raise your kid the best you know how. They don’t build schools out on lusus island, so you teach him all the important things yourself. Important things like to never leave the house without at least five computers and five guns. 

You teach him normal things as well. The maths and sciences you know so well, and the basics of grammar and history. You leave out the parts about evil alien dictators. You don't want there to be any reason for him to be targeted.

You still regret ever telling your brother about what you saw. Even if it made your childhood more bearable. Even if he kept his promise to live a normal happy and normal life. Keeping a secret like that must have been painful for him.

You used to watch all of his comedy shows. You made up your own subtle secret codes when you were younger so that Mother wouldn’t know he knew. He used them in his performances sometimes. It was often just updates about his life, but sometimes he smuggled information to you. It had to have been dangerous for him to obtain. Everytime he did something like that, your heart twisted with love and worry.

He’s gone now. He got the meteor treatment. You have a nephew you will never be able to risk talking to. Without the cryptolect you made, you have no way to safely send a message.

But that's going to have to be alright. You have your hands full enough with your own child anyway. Even at such a young age you can tell that he is brilliant with machines, even if he lacks your knack for theoretical physics. 

He’s good at people too, in a way that you've never quite managed. Whenever you are stressed, or frustrated, or fed up with the futility of it all, he knows something is up, and drags you away to show you something he found in the forest or brings you a functional toy car he made out of sticks and leaves. He doesn’t say anything about his reasons for doing such things. You think he thinks he's being sly.

After the call you get from a drunk and crying Rose, you know he has to notice whatever traces of sadness you've been able to properly hide. He talks cheerfully about some inane thing, and the chasm in your chest widens.You are going to die soon. You told Rose not to blame herself. You know more about Sburb than anyone, even her. You always knew this was a possibility. You are going to die soon, and your child is going to be on this lonely island without company until he meets the others.

You prepare to go on a final expedition to the medium. Rose said that was essential. It hurts to leave. You are here, and Jake is here, and that won’t have the opportunity to be true for much longer.

You go anyway. You wonder when you will end up this time.

You find yourself on a not destroyed Prospit, and are greeted by someone you know who doesn’t recognize you. That means you are somewhere near the beginning, then? The familiar parcel mistress draws your attention to the sky, and for the first time in your life you find yourself in the middle of a Prospitian eclipse. 

You see yourself, as a spritely young werewolf. You see Jake, a god, stepping through the doors of a new reality. Bits and pieces of three different sessions. Three years on a meteor. Green flames and red miles. Other things too.

When it's over, you look around. As you realized you ought to expect halfway through, the scenery around you is slightly to the right of what you know. There are too many towers. You have a pretty good idea of what you were called here for. Among everything else, you spotted a plot hole.

You don’t like it. At all. It's just like Skaia to only show you a happy ending so it can hold it hostage. Fine. You’ll do the bare minimum to create a plausibly consistent reality. The rest of the timeline can do its own dirty work.

You set off to rescue a juggalo.

* * *

Your name is Aradia, and you have taken it upon yourself to guide the dead. To this end, you are one of the few living long term residents of the dream bubbles. Between your time as a robot, and your adventures through the stagnant memoryscapes of others, you have spoken to people from countless doomed timelines, and even seen yourself reflected in them. So for you, having access to information, memories, and feelings that you didn’t personally experience isn’t strange at all.

* * *

You are Dirk Strider, but these days you go by Bro. Today is the day the kid enters the game, the day you die. You're oddly alright with the life you’ve lived. It's not as if you ever could have been any different, after all.

* * *

You, Roxy Lalonde, have finally gotten around to starting that book club. So far you just have two members, but you are sure you can recruit more if you play your cards right. Dave and Jade, you think. If you can get them to proselytize for you, everyone else will follow.

But for now it's you and Rose, and you intend to keep it that way until you've gotten through all of the fanfiction you drunkenly wrote. And Rose has to read Complacency of the Learned before any of your fanfiction will make sense. So that's what you are doing today.

When you enter the lounge there is significantly more blood than you were expecting. That is to say, there is a relatively small amount of blood where you weren't expecting any. Rose is applying pressure to a wound on her forehead with a towel that you are pretty sure used to be beige. 

You walk up to her with no small amount of concern and ask if you ought to take a look at the injury. 

“I appreciate that, but no. I’ve already done everything that I can until I stop the bleeding. It’ll probably heal on its own, and I intend to talk to Jane if it doesn’t.”

“What even happened to u?”

“Dirk was so focused on a project that he failed to notice my approach. When he did notice, well. He was on course to remove my head from my shoulders before I stepped away and he came back to his surroundings enough to try to miss.”

“Oh no, poor Dirk. I mean, I’ve pulled a gun on people a couple of times, but I grew up with friendly faces. I learned to look before I shoot. His childhood was all espionage and robot murder. It's hard to unlearn the things that kept you alive.”

“Yes, it is no surprise that a great number of our group have shown post traumatic symptoms. I have been attacked before and will likely be attacked again. Still, its luck that it was I who was the victim of this incident instead of Dave, even if my brother likely would have managed a successful dodge.” Rose pauses to gather her thoughts. “You should talk to him later. Dave went into a pretty bad spiral when he threw a shuriken at me, and Dirk is even worse about such things. I would do it myself, but I doubt the sight of my face would do him any favors right now”

You nod along and begin planning what you are going to say to him. Rose is exactly right. He’s going to get it into his head that this clearly means that he will never be able to exist in a society, or that Princes are only capable of destruction. Anything but the blatant fact that he, like all of you, is a messed up young adult working through the after effects of a deeply troubling childhood.

“I'll be sure to knock some sense into him. Are we still doing the readey thing, or should I launch a nationwide Dirk hunt? I’ll give 413, 000, 000 boonbucks to the person who can convince him that he is worthy of love”

“I advise that we begin reading. Even compared to any previous inclinations I may have had, I find myself rather curious of the writings of my alternate self. Do table the manhunt idea, though. It sounds rather fun.”

So it is. You plop down on the couch beside Rose and pass her a copy of Complacency of the Learned. You spend a while watching her face as she reads. She likes the book you think, with its prose written to her exact tastes, and its snide remarks that are as subtle as they are cutting. 

You see her get hit by a fit of barely contained giggles that restarts every time she calms down enough to start reading again.You aren’t close enough to read over your shoulder, but have a good guess as to where she’s at. Some things are just funnier after beating the game.

Soon after that, however, Rose goes from amused to solemn to intently focused. Whatever she is thinking about, you decide to leave her to it. And besides, if she's that caught up in her own head, you are going to be functionally alone for a while. You take the opportunity to proofread one of your wizard fic journals for content you would prefer to remain unshared.

And wow. It's even worse than you remember. Nothing you feel any real urge to toss into the void so no one can ever see it, but certainly not the pinnacle of good writing. Dave would love it. You might actually reconsider not letting him read them. Who are you to deprive your son of a narrative of dubious quality. You get about a quarter of the way through the journal before Rose breaks the comfortable silence. 

“Did I ever tell you that I once spoke to a teen version of the version of me that wrote this book?”

She spoke to your mom? Or your teen mom, which is a series of words that also applies to the girl next to you. It takes a few moments before you can formulate a reply to that.

“You didn’t. What did you talk about?”

“A few things. Before I get into my actual point, I feel that it is only right to tell you that you meant the world to her. As a seer of light, she could have brought any of infinite possible futures to pass. And of all of them, she chose the path that would someday give you and dirk the ability to live like humans, and she followed that path to the grave on more than one occasion. I made a rough transcript of that conversation when I woke up, if you want to read it sometime.”

Your voice wavers as you say “yeah. I’d like that a lot.” Oh, hello, tears. Rose mercifully doesn’t draw attention to it. She merely puts a filled captchalogue card into your hand and carries on with her speech.

“When I first met her in the dream bubbles, I knew that she wasn’t just some doomed double of me by a scar over her left eyebrow.” Rose faces you, and with the bleeding stopped and the towel gone, you can see the course taken by Dirk’s blade. Oh. Is it identical to the scar your mom got in a car crash when she was a kid. That's. Ok, that's actually really weird. You say as much, and she laughs.

“That isn’t even the top contender for the strangest part of it. I'm not sure if that honor goes to the conversation somehow having been integral to both our goals, or that when I woke up Dave told me a joke from a timeline this version of him was never a part of. Or maybe that Complacency of the Learned was written with a specific political agenda, yet the stories I wrote as a child read like early drafts of it. I wonder if I had been given the chance to grow up normally, would I have written this exact series of words even without the context that went into them?”

“So if i'm following correctly, you are suggestoing that we are all subject to some sort of convergent evolution. I’m not sure I like the implications.”

“I'm not suggesting anything yet, except that maybe I should cut off my nose to spite my face, and see what Skaia’s prophetic light has to say about that.”

“You would make a good voldemort. But knowing our lives, the second your nose was gone you would discover that another Rose Lalonde beat you to the idea.’’

“Quite so. Don’t worry about it too much. I'm not currently sure what I should be trying to accomplish, much less how to do so. For now, I just want to finish this book, and when the time comes to act I'll try not to do anything a Prospit dreamer wouldn't approve of.” 

You accept that answer as both of you settle back down to read your respective wizard stories. It's a lot to consider. Maybe information is being shared across timelines, or perhaps the game created you with certain qualities pre installed. You have another scrap of your mother to overanalyze for a sign of what you meant to her. Apparently this one is explicitly clear on the matter, as much as Rose ever is. There is a non zero chance that due to forces beyond your control you are destined to repeat the failures of the only known version of you to become a proper adult.

As you feel Rose’s weight beside you, it occurs to you once more how glad you are not to have to deal with everything alone anymore. You are so very grateful to have a family.

* * *

Name: Kankri Vantas. Age: 14 Sweeps. Blood color: Crimson.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. You scratched your session. You weren’t going to survive. And then Meenuh, oh god Meenuh, killed you so you would survive as ghosts. You aren’t a ghost. No one is.

When you were a kid, about the time you played Sgrub in your old life, you finally learned under what circumstances seeing the relationships you have with people when you look at their faces isn’t a completely useless skill. 

It started with Porrim, of course. You thought you were going crazy. It didn’t make sense. A game, petty disputes, oversized crimson sweaters. A more peaceful childhood. It couldn’t be right. Those memories couldn’t be real. Yet if it were, it would certainly explain at least one thing.

You finally understood what that nagging voice in the back of your head was trying to say. Something horribly wrong with troll society, huh? You could have figured that out on your own. And this time the voice was right. If you didn’t at least try to fix this no one would.

When you caught a glimpse of a picture of the conesce’s face, more details came into focus. You knew that you could never win. You made a deal, and this was the price. The next generation has to be better prepared. 

Still, when you looked around you knew that trolls could be so much more than this. Meenuh was highly problematic in everything she did, but ultimately a good person. She saved your skin more times than you can count. Now she. You made a plan to go talk to her once. Porrim-- No, not your Porrim. The Dolorosa stopped you. She didn’t want you to die, and she said the Condesce would kill you on sight.

She was right, of course. She usually is. It hurts. It's such a cruel mockery of everything Meenuh tried to do, even if she would enjoy the role. It hurts. You hurt, and it can’t matter. The children of the world before you might be able to beat a game you never could, but at the rate things are going they will rip each other's throats out before they ever have the chance.

You have to prepare them for something better than that. 

You do everything you can. You appear in a village to give the people hope for a better world, and disappear into the dawn before the authorities ever realize you are there. You recruit countless followers, and teach them of the lies told by the upper class. 

Most of your closest confidants are people whose faces bring back memories. The fact that this new world has changed them doesn’t bother you as much as it used to. It changed you as well. Some things transcend timelines, and the bond you feel when working toward a common purpose seems to be one of them.

Talking people’s ears off is the easy part of the job. It comes naturally to you. You've been giving sermons since long before you had any real problems to cry about. Given a world as problematic as the one you've been born into this time, you find yourself producing an endless stream of rousing speeches.

Riots often follow in your wake, and that's the hard part. More bloodshed. It's only fitting. Blood is all about leadership and your connections to others. You are beginning to suspect in light of the name and recent events it might actually be the aspect of leading people to their deaths.

The most messed up part is probably how backwards your priorities are. You don't want anyone to die. You are fighting for a world where death isn’t so obscenely common. Yet, you've already put an end to troll civilization once. What weight on your conscience are a few wiped out settlements when compared to that?

The things that get to you these days are a lot more personal than that. You spent a while wondering why this iteration of troll society was so different from the first. Much of the violence can be explained by the Condesce’s reign, but that theory doesn’t account for changes in ancient folklore.

It made sense when you arrived at the scene of a massacre and met the folklore in question. She had Damara’s face. She isn’t damara anymore. You remembered you had a conversation with Damara once, where the topic came up that your group was 12 strong with a member of almost every bloodcaste. It made you realize that you are still missing so much of your old life, and that you always will be.

Even if you found the rest of the 12, your entire existence couldn’t possibly have been summed up by your connections to 11 people. There was an entire world out there once, and you were a part of it. Your early childhood, before you met them, is gone forever.

Then she left for a different time. You never saw the Handmaid again. Of course, it was silly to operate on the assumption that you were the only one to take your powers with you to the new reality. So what if your task just evolved from making a better society for the next generation to derailing the plans of an unawakened god of time? What does it matter?

One more friend on the other side of history just means that you have to step up your game.

* * *

You are Dirk Strider, and at age seventeen the world you once knew is gone. It's strange to only came to that conclusion after you returned to the planet you spent almost all of your life, but it's almost truer for it. The desolate water wasteland is gone, now full of grass, and bugs, and other things you don't know how to deal with.

Even the stars are different. Which is ostensibly the reason you and the others have come here this evening. The new constellations aren’t going to name themselves.

Rose calls dibs on the sun being her celestial body, which leads to an absurd debate on who gets other fringe cases. Roxy tried to claim the moon, on aspect grounds. You campaigned for it to go to dave, on the grounds of referencing a pop culture dead thrice over.

Jade happened to notice that there was a black hole relatively close to earth C, which started up the debate again with new contenders. You absconded about the time a third person suggested that a certain cluster of stars looked suspiciously like a person being decapitated. 

It wasn’t the suggestion itself, really. More that thirteen people in one place is still a lot for you. Two of the trolls have no sense of volume. Rose is so much like you that she could absolutely pick you to pieces. Dave keeps flinching. Jake is Jake, and you love him, and he keeps flinching too. Not at you, any time recently, but it still twists something up inside you.

Shortly after you all arrived on earth C you were overcome by a bout of teenage stupidity and tried to flirt with him. Jane pulled you aside and scolded you for that. Something about how Jake needs you as a friend right now, and any attempts at romance would only serve to further traumatize him.

You figured it was something Hal did. You were tempted to make plans to help. Elaborate plans. Plans that would inevitably do more harm than good. You instead resolved to thoroughly back off. You’ve traumatized enough people for several lifetimes.

Yet despite your best efforts you haven’t been able to stop hurting people. There was that incident with Rose. You feel horrible about hurting her, but she doesn’t seem uneasy around you. She’s the same as ever, just with one more scar. You are reasonably sure that you hurt her face and nothing deeper. 

But if it had been someone else. The thoughts keep circling around in your head. If it had been one of the trolls, and you hadn’t snapped back to reality in time, you could have killed someone. Sure Rose can forgive a scar, but you doubt she would be so gracious if you slit Kanaya’s throat. 

She just hasn’t realized it yet. You should go before you hurt anyone. It's all princes are good for. And if it had been dave.

You don't want to even think about that. He would have dodged. He wouldn’t be hurt, which you know in your head is a better outcome than someone actually literally dying. But he would never stop feeling the need to dodge. You would have single handedly obliterated all the progress he’s made.

The thought makes you physically ill. You can’t let yourself do this. You have to stop hurting people.

You hear footsteps behind you, and in light of your recent declaration fight your instinct to draw your sword. 

“Sup” says Roxy.

“Sup” you say back, still not quite used to talking to people.

She sits down beside you and dramatically drapes herself against your shoulders. You aren’t sure, but you think you smile just a little. You love her so much it hurts. This is the girl you found wandering on Derse, and guided home. The girl who found you wasting away in your apartment, and pulled you up. You love her, but not in the way she wants you to, and that hurts as well. 

“Callie won the black hole debate. Really, if I were going for thematic relevance, I would be better off not having a constellation of my own. Or mabe deunexist-ifying one. U kno how it is”

She’s started trying to migrate her typing style to speech. She’s better at it than she was even a week ago.

When the game started she spoke almost like you, with the emphasis on the wrong syllables and a volume that wasn't conducive to actual conversations. She spent her time in the medium figuring out how to talk normally, and has recently started messing it up on purpose. You think you can almost understand why. It finally occurs to you what Hal was getting at back then.

“Do you remember learning to speak English?”

“Why yes, I do. Truly an elusive beast, that English. I had to use my haxing skilz to watch ancient movies before I understood half of what he said, and I still get lost sometimes.”

You almost snort. “I meant actual modern english, when we were younger. It's a miracle that either of us can speak at all, given our upbringing. You at least had the carapacians to teach you how to exist in a society but I, by all accounts, should be absolutely feral.”

Roxy makes a series of gestures that you translate automatically. Can you understand this?. You gesture back much more slowly, having never had anything to say to a carapace. Yes. I understand.

“See! U had the chess people too. U should only be slightly more feral than me. Rose and I have been talking about something that might explain the rest. So basically u kno how the trolls know englsh too, and how ur bro ended up with the exact same pair of sunglasses in both timelines?”

You nod, really not liking where this is going. Roxy continues in spite of your trepidation.

“Well, via some strange combination of genetic bias, cross timeline information sharing, and improbable coincidence, we seem to be on a mild convergence path with some other versions of this.”

“Roxy. I know you don’t tend to see things my way, and usually you are at least sort of right, but you do realize who I have as alternate selves, right? If I’m destined to become more like them, I really should get out of dodge before someone gets hurt”

“Who said u were going to become more like them. Who knows? Maybe if they’d had some more time they would have grown to be more like u.”

“That's really not as comforting as you would like it to be.”

“Ok, then. How about this? I have it on seer authority that you and I, more definitely than anyone else, are in control of our own lives. U might get some impressions or memories from ur waywards selves, but the ultimate choice of who u are is yours and yours alone.”

“Also not as comforting as you’d like, given my track record. But it's something. I want to be good, but that might change. I’m imagining futures where it does, and I would hate to have any part in them”

“Please don’t run off and burn ur bridges. You told me once, about Hal, that you couldn’t stop what he was doing with Jake because u could never force the unending isolation of our childhoods on anypony. Those are the exact words u used. Extend yourself the same courtesy”

There is no real argument to counter the magic of friendship. She has you beat. Your only real chance at avoiding making an unbearably sappy promise you're not sure you will be able to keep months or years down the line is to change the topic.

“Jake did say once that he had a metric ton of subconscious information about the game. I have no clue where that would play into your theory but it seems relevant.” 

“Yeah.” she starts, and then points at the sky “hey, those stars look sorta like a person being decapitated. It's perfect for u.”

You practically scream at that.

**Author's Note:**

> Roxy Lalonde is the dialogue fairy. She bestows the ability to use quotation marks upon all she interacts with.


End file.
